LTREB Renewal: Collaborative Research: Understanding the strength, duration, and stability of connectivity effects on community diversity

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Habitat loss is the greatest cause of species diversity loss, as it isolates small patches of habitat along with the plant and animal populations in these fragments. This project examines landscape connectivity, and the degree to which landscape corridors of natural vegetation among fragments facilitate the movement of organisms and alleviate the isolating effects of fragmentation. Although landscape connectivity is considered to be fundamental to the maintenance of species diversity, there is remarkably little evidence documenting the effects of corridors on species diversity. The investigators will extend an ongoing experiment explicitly designed to test the effects of landscape connectivity on diversity. Results to date show that species diversity of plants increases when fragments are connected by corridors, but the question remains whether these responses are short-term or persistent. The project will generate long-term data to resolve the relationship between connectivity, diversity, and time, in order to determine whether connectivity effects are long-lasting or transient, and evaluate underlying causes of this relationship. A website dedicated to bridging the science and practice of conservation corridors, ConservationCorridor.org, will contribute to these efforts. Graduate and undergraduate students will be engaged in and trained through participation in the research, continuing a successful collaboration with the US Forest Service to train and mentor women and students from underrepresented groups.Landscape connectivity, or the degree to which the landscape facilitates dispersal, is viewed as afundamentally important factor regulating species diversity. This has led to a large and growing emphasis on connectivity in ecological theories of diversity and in conservation of ecosystems impacted by habitat fragmentation and environmental variation. How connectivity affects temporally variable communities, such as those undergoing succession or being influenced by disturbance events or climate variability is uncertain. This research will advance our understanding of the importance of connectivity for community diversity using a long term dataset. The research team will continue to collect core data to extend the time series, as well as new data on species abundances, and create a database of plant species functional traits. The proposed research will identify the ecological mechanisms responsible for observed patterns of species richness over time, including whether connectivity increases colonization rates or decreases extinction rates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.